Volume 2012, Issue 190

This article discusses “mathematization of the world” as it was elaborated by Edmund Husserl who focuses on the figure of Galileo and his rediscovery of the heliocentric system in the seventeenth century. The author argues that the latter event became definitional not only for the formation of ideal objectivity but for a wide spectrum of relations between natural sciences and the life-world. Umberto Eco provides a literary exemplar of this thesis, demonstrating that idealization of the physical body carried out by Galileo found its match in the Aristotelian telescope invented to create ideal subjectivity.

Peirce's ten trichotomies are presented as an elaboration of semeiosis, that is, a sign producing an interpretant. This elaboration details how a sign can produce a metaphor, a hypothesis or a decision. After describing the ten trichotomies, the essay shows through detailed illustrations how the ten trichotomies enable us to understand the nuances of the sign's addressing tension within the experienced object. Depending on whether the experience is of the unfamiliar, the unexpected or the unacceptable (choice), the resultant interpretants are shown to vary as metaphor, hypothesis or decision.

The legal term “fundamental rights” has been well recognized in international treaties and legislations. The present study investigates the stipulations on fundamental rights in the four versions (1954, 1975, 1978, and 1982) of and four Amendments (1988, 1993, 1999, and 2004) to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from a sociosemiotic perspective. The findings in this study indicate that the provisions in the Constitution are crafted in such a manner that the dominant social and political participants employ them to maintain their ruling position and promote social and economic developments. In the successive versions and Amendments to the PRC Constitution, the evolution of the provisions on fundamental rights not only demonstrates the development of fundamental rights in China, but also illuminates the underlying mediation mainly among the Chinese government, the Communist Party of China (CPC), and Chinese people. The connotation and validity therein is constructed through communication and competition among various participants. It is therefore argued that the status quo of fundamental rights in China is the result of mediation among the relevant participants under the impact of the social and economic development. The State and the CPC are thus suggested to loosen their grips to promote Chinese people's participation in the mediation process with more attention to the social and economic reality. This study also implies that the definition of a legal term is constrained by other sign systems and hence the importance of an understanding of terminological dynamicity.

The aim of this paper is to analyze a specific printed advertisement from two different semiotic points of view. First, we apply the interpretative instruments provided by the Barthes' school of thinking (focused on the description of explicit signs taken in isolation). We then attempt to explore the same print employing the prospective of Greimas' structural semiotics (where a sign has meaning only when it is interpreted as part of a system).

This article first traces the development of a contrapuntal writing system through three articles by Bram in Semiotica. A poem,“On Standing Before an Egyptian Inscription” presents the problem of the Note: what is occurring “between the lines” of the poem's doublets. The work of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Dorothea Olkowski supplies hints toward a definition of the unwritten, “unspeakable” words generated by the written words of the doublets. Six characteristics of unspeakable words finally suggest themselves: they are singular, private, fluid, archaic, and humorous, and they do not submit to the principle of noncontradiction.

This paper adopts a social semiotic perspective to investigate how hypermodal resources (e.g., text, image, hyperlinks) integrate on two university homepages to simultaneously create an official gateway and an institutional identity. In the first case, the homepage of National University of Singapore foregrounds and promotes its identity as a vibrant community that is global and welcoming by appealing images, interpersonally-orientated linguistic choices, rich navigation content, and various navigation styles. Tsinghua University in China, on the other hand, adopts a university-centric position in its homepage design by presenting its identity as a traditional and authoritative institution that keeps its distance from society at large through the impersonal nature of the images and linguistic texts, and the repetitive hierarchical navigation styles. These semiotic choices are interpreted from a socio-cultural perspective and the universities' involvement in marketization. The present study builds upon and extends multimodal approaches to hypermedia by considering the relations between hypermodal analytics and higher-level cultural and ideological meanings.

The concepts of nāṭya, rasa, and abhinaya that were proposed in the context of Classical Indian theatre are invoked by the practitioners and scholars of classical Indian dance even today. They acknowledge and bestow a special status to theatrical communication. The demarcation of the aesthetic function is also one of the premises in the Prague School structural-semiotic theory. We shall examine the inter-relations between the semiotics of theatre elaborated by Keir Elam, and the conceptual base of classical Indian dance. By reading the Indian concepts through the perspectives of modern semiotics, we attempt to show that although the two theories belong to different traditions of scholarship, there are sites of conceptual convergence.

Chemical periodicity is widely recognized as one fundamental idea in science and much of the existing research attempts to discover one periodic table most accurately depicting the natural order. This article adopts a multimodal perspective on the periodic system by analyzing its historical evolution and the constructed nature of periodic tables. The analysis indicates that chemical periodicity was culturally shaped as specialized functionalities for classifying elements by their similar chemical behaviors. We argue that tabular representations have powerful yet constrained modal affordances to interpret scientific phenomena and that social semiotics provides a preliminary meta-language for teaching and learning chemical periodicity.

Using a narrative-semiotic approach, this paper explores some devices used by film to create a worldview and a philosophical approach to identity and action. To achieve this, the paper explores how certain film noir hybrids, which are based on the same prototypical story, modify narrative and stylistic elements to produce different text-worlds. It analyzes a highly influential cinematic text, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967), and discusses some prominent stylistic and thematic elements that have been re-constructed and re-positioned differently in various films that trace their artistic origins to Melville's text. This paper considers two of these films, John Woo's The Killer (1989) and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog (1999). It examines their commonalities and differences through an analysis of how they: a) dramatize the tension between language (saying) and action (doing); b) encode action through a stylization of physical movement; c) employ camera angle and distance to frame action sequences; d) employ modalities of light and color to qualify the represented action.

The ways in which we manage to achieve representation of our mental signs in the world lying beyond our crania retain a perennial interest among semioticists, especially when those signs use the vocal tract (tongue, lips, larynx, etc.) or the scribal tract (mainly the hand). (Face and shoulders also convey a lot, as by winking and shrugging, but these fall well short of our present compass.) In both vocal and scribal media “semiotic evolution” affects our physical realizations, changing them over time, hence how we get outside our crania (when we do) and what our signs end up signifying. In what follows I mean to offer a fresh analysis of the influence of the scribal tract's three digits, the “scriptor,” by means of which, armed with the needful prosthetic device (pen or otherwise), we realize our mental signs on the page.

This paper is a study in cultural semiotics, aiming at a dynamic application of semiotic relations (cf., e.g., Neuman 2003; Danesi 2004; Bateson 1972; Kress and Van Leeuwen 1992; Deely 2009). The argument aims to introduce a heuristic modeling of social space. The sources for the analysis are the photos taken by the author in 2006–2009 in Poland, Italy, and Austria. Based on the underpinnings from contemporary linguistic models, cybernetics, and visual communication studies, a proposal of a paradigm is elaborated that tries to parameterize and formalize the dynamics of social space in terms of relations. The model is functional: the division into “icon,” “symbol,” and “index” ensues from the internal structuring of correlations, grounded by the function of a particular sign.

Some of the spatial properties of surfaces can be translated by touch as well as vision. Both blind and sighted people can equally perceive corners and edges, their minds being equally capable of recognizing objects or arrangements of these. A fundamental difference, however, must be kept in mind: while most of the time the visual system readily homogenizes sensitive data through unity constructing, the haptic system usually “makes experiments” across time, which can be unified by a rule of interpretation only afterwards. Those are two different kinds of logic: visually knowing an object — or arrangement of objects — is to perceive it from general to particular, and tactilely knowing an object — or arrangement of objects — is to perceive it from particular to general. In this paper, with the theoretical background of Peircean semiotics, we address the issue of how touch (predominantly inductive) and vision (predominantly deductive) are complementary perceptual/critical senses that are ecologically connected. Such senses can be intersemiotically translated, as outline drawings demonstrate. A map produced for sighted and blind persons will be examined in an attempt to show how diagrammatical reasoning can be developed from predominantly deductive or inductive cognitive processes, and possibly share common representations for haptic and visual systems.

The prototype theory of genres (e.g., Sinding 2002) posits that a genre can be regarded as a cognitive category, conforming to principles of human categorization. In the present article we extend this cognitive view of genres by addressing a relatively under-researched issue: the initial process of genre formation, or in other words, the birth of a genre. In particular, we examine two “formative texts” — the studies by Martin Esslin and Aleks Sierz. In both studies the authors constructed a theatrical genre, introducing the “Theatre of the Absurd” and “In-Yer-Face Theatre,” respectively. Our major question is: to what extent did cognitive principles of categorization play a role in the formation of the genres in question, as manifested in these formative texts? We focus on the cognitive principles underlying the major critical strategies employed in each of these two studies in the establishment of the category; and contend that these critical strategies adhere to the three fundamental categorization principles — the basic level, the prototype structure, and “category as a theory.”

The third edition of the now classic and basic reference work for semiotic research, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics (published by Mouton de Gruyter), first edited by the world-renowned semiotician, Thomas A. Sebeok in 1986 and revised by him in 1994 has undergone a significant revamping by University of Toronto scholar and Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica , Marcel Danesi. Newly published in 2010, this basic research tool for semiotics remains the quintessential reference work for every scholar in this field. It would be hard to imagine that any researcher would be able to engage in meaningful scholarship without it.